Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(123)

“Halina Berg is vaguely familiar, but not the other.”

“How could she see this Halina Berg yesterday? She’s four days in a coma.”

“She couldn’t have.”

The fourth line began to appear, flowed swiftly, and, with the concluding question mark, read, Why didn’t I ask Halina Berg about Ashley Bell?

“The name in her tattoo,” Pogo said.

For a minute or so, they both watched the notebook, waiting impatiently for a fifth line of script to appear, but then Pogo resorted to his smartphone.

Kanani returned to ask if they wanted anything more, and Pax said they didn’t, and she left the check.

While Pax busied himself with calculating the tip and paying the tab, Pogo said, “It’s not as bad as John Smith or Heather anything, but there are enough Ashley Bells spread around the country to waste more time than we have.”

“Try Robert Warren Faulkner.”

“Already on it.”

Nothing more appeared on the open pages of the notebook. Pax was reluctant to leaf farther back in the volume, in search of more deeply buried messages, lest he disturb whatever connection allowed this communication from Bibi in her coma or from whatever Otherwhere she also inhabited. It was as if his girl, adrift on the sea of an alien world, had put a message in a bottle and tossed it overboard, and somehow it had surfaced on the shores of this world.

He picked up his Corona. Put it down without taking a sip. His fingers were wet with condensation from the bottle. He blotted them on his jeans. He realized that he had grown nervous. He was rarely nervous. Cautious, concerned, alarmed, even afraid, yes, but seldom nervous. He tipped his head back and gazed up at the sharks. He knew how to deal with sharks. It was part of his training. He knew how to deal with the loss of men he fought with, brothers and friends, every one of them. He didn’t know how to deal well with loss outside the context of war.

Pogo said, “There’s a bunch of Robert Faulkners, but in a quick search, none of them with that middle name.”

“Halina Berg.”

Pogo came back to him quickly on that one. “It’s a pen name. She wrote one book under it. Her first novel. Something called Out of the Mouth of the Dragon.”

“Whose pen name?”

The smartphone was the planet in Pogo’s hand, which billions of advertising dollars and the wisdom of uncountable pundits had assured him was tech magic, the only true magic. But when he looked up, his eyes seemed to see—and his face to reflect—the wonder of a witness to otherworldly mystery that, luminous and melodic, had just entered the comparatively dim and discordant world of high-tech.

“Halina Berg was a pen name for Toba Ringelbaum.”

As a girl, Toba had escaped the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt, where her mother died in a typhoid epidemic. Later, she survived as well the Auschwitz death camp, where her father perished. Decades after marrying Max Klein and emigrating to the U.S., she’d written a series of young-adult novels about a school for girls, Valiant Academy, where the multitalented headmistress was an adventurer and master of martial arts who not only educated her charges, but also led them on thrilling missions against villains who represented one face or another of the hydra-headed evil that was totalitarianism.

Pax knew all that because he knew Toba Ringelbaum. He had met her twice in Bibi’s company. Pogo knew the old woman even better, having visited her often with Bibi.

Bibi had found the Valiant Girl series when she was ten and had read and reread the novels through her teens.

In the notebook, her handwriting seemed almost to glow: When I saw her yesterday, why didn’t I ask Halina Berg if she’d heard of Robert Warren Faulkner—is he a known neo-Nazi?

That question gave rise to another one in Paxton’s mind: Why would she refer to her friend and mentor Toba Ringelbaum by the writer’s pen name?

“I’ll call Toba,” said Pogo, “if you want to go there.”

“Oh, I want to go there, all right,” Pax said. “But come on. Let’s roll. I’ll call her from the car.”





In the headlight-silvered fog, which slowly but deliberately spiraled like galaxies in formation, Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack stood within a pocket of clear air, as in one school of religious painting a saint always stood—or levitated—within a shining nimbus. Judging by all the available evidence, the former English teacher was no more saintlike than a worm, and in fact the worm had the moral advantage of not knowing the difference between right and wrong.

The “we” in her threat—

We can take you down and break you down so completely, no one could ever put you together again. And we will.

—put her in Terezin’s neo-Nazi cult and eliminated any chance that the selection of her husband as the builder of Terezin, Inc.’s new headquarters had been a coincidence.

“Where’s the girl?” Bibi asked. “Where are they holding her?”

“As if I’d tell you.”

“Tell me.”

“As if you need me to tell you.”

“Does that mean something?”

“You know.”

“Don’t riddle me.”

“Don’t make me a riddle.”

Bibi raised the pistol in her right hand.

“Gidget breaks bad,” said Hoffline-Vorshack.